Cherry River Boom & Lumber Company 2-8-0 "Consolidation" Locomotives in the USA

Class 15 (Locobase 13895)

Data from Baldwin Locomotive Works Specification for Engines as digitized by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University, Volume 40, p. 23. See also "Richwood, W. Va.", Baltimore & Ohio Employees Magazine (April 1922), p. 63. A L Craig, "City of Richwood", Clarksburg Telegram, 8 May 1927; and Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: railroads, deforestation, and social change in West Virginia, 1880-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 95-98. Works numbers were 37809 in June 1912 and 49655 in August 1918.

The CRB&LC constructed its first mill in 1901 in the new town of Richwood, about 120 miles south of Clarksburg, West Virginia. A L Craig reported that at its founding, Richwood had 24 inhabitants. By 1927, its population had grown to 7,000. At that time, Craig said: "Cherry River Boom & Lumber Company has in connection with its saw mill at Richwood a lath mill and large planing mill and a machine shop equipped to handle anything from a lawn mower to a locomotive."

CRB&LC operated on 140 miles of standard gauge railroad using eighteen locomotives powered by fuel from"...its own electrically-equipped coal mine at North Bond, 9 miles out of Richwood " as part of the 42,000 tons of New River coal dug annually. Four counties held 200,000 acres of timber, or about 310 square miles of nearly continuous holdings in Nicholas Webster, Greenbrier, Pocahontas and Randolph counties. The B&O article notes that the employees were known as "Hemlock savages", but says the local opinion was that Richwood wouldn't exist were it not for the logging.

The 15 was delivered as a 2-8-0, but had an auxiliary trailing axle added sometime after it entered service. Thus converted to a bastard 2-8-2, the 15 served the CRB & LC for almost 50 years before being scrapped in 1960. The 18 arrived as a 2-8-0 in 1919.